Here are 100 books that Life Sentences fans have personally recommended if you like
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As the photographer Stieglitz once wrote, “Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.” I was born into what was considered a mixed marriage in Argentina, then moved to LA, where I became a foreigner on top of being a mongrel. My family life was turbulent, but I found surrogate parents through my circle of school friends and, eventually, a close-knit community in the local motorcycle world. As I had no roots in my new culture, I spoke freely to anyone, and found family in all sorts of extravagant situations. I’ve continued to explore the permutations of family in my writing for decades now.
This was my favorite book the year I read it, and I will read it again, with no doubt the same result. The narrator is an anonymous 18-year-old woman navigating family, community, and romantic relationships in the midst of the Irish Troubles.
Almost every character is identified by a local nickname, part town culture and part a way to keep both authorities and rebels off track. I loved the strong writing and the surprising but always plausible twists. I’ve recommended it to every reader I know.
Liberty fabric covered editions bring classics from the Faber backlist together with important modern titles, putting them in conversation and celebrating both the history and the future of Faber & Faber.
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and…
All of my recommended books feature female protagonists with complex lives. They are layered with friends, families, work, and romantic challenges. They are not superheroes. Yet they are. They all find a way to do the hard thing in difficult circumstances and at great personal peril. And that’s what bravery is. It’s not Captain Marvel coming in to save the world. It’s a woman with responsibilities and problems who digs deep to act with integrity. And she may not get accolades. Her act may be unseen. But she does it. And I love reading about these everyday women with grit.
This book sticks the reader in the middle of a maternity ward in poverty and flu-stricken Dublin circa 1918. I was totally rooting for nurse Julia Powers, an experienced maternity nurse who works long, thankless shifts trying to keep women and their babies alive.
The lack of medicine, staffing, and money is appalling as women enter the hospital to give birth. Yet through empathy, determinism, and quick thinking, Julia, her trainee, and her patients find ways to help each other. It’s a tour de force in female friendship, intelligence, and problem-solving and an indictment of the medical incompetency of male physicians.
It illuminates a cross-section of Dublin citizens struggling with poverty, the Great Flu, and the aftermath of a horrendous war. I found the story moving, gripping, and somehow hopeful.
In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews).
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
David has lost his wife far too early. A man in mourning, he relives their twenty years together and sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he had simply not noticed, or was it more that he had chosen not to. The writing here is spectacular and the theme of love and loss so very moving. Set between Ireland and Spain, McMahon captures the sublime and mundane nature of long-term love with exceptional skill. Another reason I like this book is that in my debut novel, my main character Maurice Hannigan, while very different from David, was also a widower, and naturally, the issue of loss figured heavily so I feel a bond to this book that is very special.
'A poignant, gentle and astutely observed novel about marriage and the evolution of love' Sunday Times, NOVELS OF THE YEAR 2020 ________________
Is there such a thing as a perfect marriage?
David thought so. But when his wife Mary Rose dies suddenly he has to think again. In reliving their twenty years together David sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he simply hadn't noticed. Or had chosen not to.
Figuring out who Mary Rose really was and the secrets that she kept - some of these hidden in plain sight - makes David wonder if he really…
I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
I love Donal Ryan’s work and thankfully he is a prolific writer. Really, I could have chosen any of his books, but this one is his most recent and had me rereading sentence after sentence because his prose is so full of beauty. Paddy and Kit Gladney’s daughter disappears in 1973. They know nothing of where she has gone and if she is alive at all. Five years later she returns, with a son, changing the course of her family’s life forever. This a beautiful and devastating exploration of loss, alienation, and the redemptive power of love and affirms Ryan as one of the best storytellers Ireland has ever known.
"Mr. Ryan writes conspicuously beautiful prose... The fleeting happiness and abiding melancholy of the asymmetry, heightened by the intimately rendered surroundings, brings out Mr. Ryan's most sensuous and emotive writing." -The Wall Street Journal
From the Booker nominated author of From a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan's new novel follows the Gladney family across three generations seeking the true meaning of what it is to find home and love.
In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland…
I’m deeply interested in the lives of my ancestors including the times they lived through so in researching our family tree I took into account the historical events they witnessed. This is what led me to read and write historical fiction. One branch of my family where survivors of the Great Hunger so I have done a lot of research on this dark period of Irish history. During WW1 my husband’s great uncle died in the trenches as an Irishman fighting in the British Army while at the same time my English grandfather and his two brothers were imprisoned as conscientious objectors, one of them dying as a consequence.
This is an eyewitness account of the Great Hunger in Ireland for the years 1847-1849, written by an American woman who felt pity for the poor Irish immigrants fleeing their native land. Her first trip to Ireland was just before the Great Hunger and although conditions were bad then, they were much worse on her second visit. Her accounts allow the reader to see what takes place through her eyes and they are harrowing at times. Not only does the author inform us of the dire situation of the poor but she also pays tribute to those who lost their lives in the struggle to help others. This was one of the books I used as a reference while writing my own series.
"Annals of the Famine in Ireland" is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the effects and contributing causes of the Great Famine. But it is not a history. It does not merely trot out facts and figures. Rather, it is a personal and emotional response from an eye-witness to the calamity. Histories are generally detached from the events that they record but, in this account, the reader will experience an immediacy to the situation as though transported back to the very time and place. The anecdotal nature of the testimony allows it to be so.
A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.
This is the book to read if you are young or seeking something for a young reader.
The suffering and endurance of ordinary men women and children during those terrible years is described with empathy and admiration. It is also, as the book description states, "the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope."
In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people.
Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland. Black Potatoes is the compelling story of men, women, and children who defied landlords and searched empty fields for scraps of harvested vegetables and edible weeds to eat,…
I was a teenager when I discovered that my grandfather was an Irish rebel during the War of Independence. As a Canadian, I was astounded by the stories he told me when we were alone during my first visit to Dublin. At 16, I promised him I would write a book about him. Alas, he was long gone when I got started. Researching, I would think of him, whispering anecdotes to me he never told his children. I discovered the stories were much worse than he let on. I could not stop until I got the whole story down on paper. I think he is smiling.
I love this book because it is a compilation of first-person accounts of major events throughout the history of Ireland. From St. Patrick to the raids of the Vikings, the rebellions of former rebels, and all the way to the civil war of 1923-24. Each selection is from extant works located in libraries and institutions around the country.
We hear the wild stories told with awe and wonder, with shock and abhorrence, as if we are sitting in a pub listening to the author whisper his witness in astonishment or regret. Suddenly, we understand the Irish rebels, the generations of rebels through the centuries, and we find ourselves full of admiration for those men and women who endured and fought and finally found freedom for their countrymen.
The history of Ireland told through the words of the people who lived it
Eyewitness to Irish History draws upon original source materials to capture the tumultuous events and rich texture of Irish history like no other book. Comparing the readings compiled here to snapshots, the renowned Celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis offers what is, in essence, a family album of Ireland and the Irish people—beginning with Golamh, the legendary leader of the band of Iberian Celts who settled the island more than three thousand years ago, and concluding with gripping firsthand accounts by those on both sides of the…
I’ve chosen to recommend fiction by Irish women, because I’m a female Irish writer myself. My own books are mostly for children, but, hey, I’m an adult. As well as a writer I am a retired publisher, a not-quite-retired editor, and an occasional translator, so I tend to engage very closely – OK, obsessively – with text. I have a pretty serious visual impairment, so most of my ‘reading’ is through the medium of audiobooks. I’m never sure if that influences my taste in reading. Anyway, these are the books I’ve liked recently, and hope you do too.
Let’s be clear: the title is ironic. This is a love story, told mostly in retrospect. Well, it’s not love exactly. It’s sex. Or a kind of twisted idea of romance. It’s attraction anyway, not quite obsessive, but close. And it’s mysterious. Who are these people? How do they connect to each other? How do they know each other? Do they even like each other? Why/why not?
The answers, if readers can identify them, are not reassuring. And yet... I loved this book, read it twice, straight off. It’s partly the descriptions of the physical world – natural and constructed – always partial, never conclusive, that are so attractive to read.
'A beautiful, wry love story' David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY
'I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences' Diana Evans, author of ORDINARY PEOPLE
'One of the year's most beautifully written books, THIS HAPPY traces the path to womanhood of Alannah from disastrous affair to no-less-comfortable marriage and beyond' The i, Best Books of 2020 So Far
'If you loved Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE, read this novel ... Darkly romantic ... Reminiscent of Eimear McBride's lyrical Joycean sentences' Vogue
'The best novel I have read all year' Sunday Business Post
As an experienced teacher I was fascinated by how writing personal stories helped to develop confidence as well as oral and written self-expression at different levels of complexity in children across the primary school age range. This encouraged me to embark on a MA in creative writing where I wrote an extended autobiographical piece that focused on how the relationship between my father and myself affected my childhood. I continued this research into my doctoral studies in Irish autobiography. I explored the history of Irish autobiography, memory, and identity formation. This research provided the context to write my own childhood memoir I Am Patrick.
In 1899, the Irish novelist, Hannah Lynch wrote her memoir Autobiography of a Child. She caused controversy in Ireland and abroad by attempting to represent her childhood up to the age of twelve narrated through the child’s voice, a strategy I adopted but from the ageing child’s point of view where the language and thought process become more complex as I grow older. Her use of adult reflection upon the child’s unstable memory demonstrates an original understanding of the child’s point of view and its representation. Hannah uncovered the inescapable cycle of harsh treatment by her parents within a large family and the physical abuse by nuns at school. Her book reinforces the unreliability of memory for autobiography and helped me to accept that total veracity is not possible.
It is a powerful first-person narrative follows the story of a young Irish girl from her earliest memory to around twelve years of age, tracing the shaping of "the Dublin Angela" into "the English Angela" and ultimately Angela of Lysterby, "the Irish rebel." This tale is told from the perspective of her older self, now "a hopeless wanderer" with youth and optimism behind her. The narrative opens with a startling sketch of Angela's mother, "a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me," before relating fragmented memories of an idyllic time spent in rural Kildare while "put out to nurse"…
I’m an Irish writer and historian. I always enjoyed history, even in school, and I went on to study it at Maynooth University, receiving a BA. I became a history teacher and eventually head of the history department in Méanscoil Iognáid Rís. I began writing local history articles for the Dunlavin arts festival and the parish magazine. I went back to university and got a first-class honours MA from Maynooth, before being awarded a PhD from DCU. I’ve won the Lord Walter Fitzgerald prize and the Irish Chiefs’ Prize, and my students were winners in the Decade of Centenaries competition. Now retired, I continue to write and lecture about history!
This is an unusual, ambitious, and relevant book, focusing on the Christian values contained within Irish political thought over a period of approximately three hundred years (from the late eighteenth century to approximately the year 2000). Many Irish politicians and patriots included a Christian element in their visions of and for an independent or a self-governed Ireland. Beginning with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of the 1790s, this Christian element is traced through Emmet, O’Connell, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, the Home Rulers, and the leaders of the 1916 rising. The book goes on to trace the Christian vision through the periods of the Irish Revolution, independent Ireland, and the northern troubles of the late twentieth century. Engrossing and insightful, this excellent book provides much food for thought!
Marsden, John. Redemption in Irish History. Dublin, Dominican Publications, 2005. 14 x 21cm. 219 pages. Original softcover. Excellent condition, as new other than inscription to previous owner on half-title page. Redemption in Irish History comes at a critical historical juncture for Irish society and Irish Christianity. Through bringing theology, politics, history and economics into creative dialogue, Redemption in Irish History offers an integrative vision of how Irish society might be nourished from the best of its diverse traditions and thereby truly flourish in our increasingly inter-dependent world. Topics including Pearse and Connolly, history, theology, politics, economics come together in creative…
